Accidental Genius

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Accidental Genius

THE HISTORY ISSUE

What turns a good idea into the next insanely great thing? Inspiration, perspiration, and the law of unintended consequences.

GunpowderIntended use: Prolonging lifeIt began as a Taoist project aimed at finding the secret to immortality. In the eighth century BC, Chinese alchemists heated various compounds in an effort to transform them from one state into another. The secretive and often haphazard experiments were supposed to tap into the transmutations that in nature took thousands of years. Taoists hoped to discover a way to master those changes and, in the process, produce an "immortality pill."

Which is how the Chinese came up with an odd mixture of saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and charcoal or dry honey. The powder was used as a treatment for skin diseases and as a fumigant to kill insects.

But it turned out to have a bit of a bang. In AD 850, this formula, which came to be known as gunpowder, was published in a book called Classified Essentials of the Mysterious Tao of the True Origin of Things. The author warned that "smoke and flames result, so that [the experimenters'] hands and faces have been burned, and even the whole house where they were working burned down."

The deadly potential of gunpowder soon found a use in imperial China. In 1044, a Chinese manual on producing gunpowder-based weapons included cannons, bombs for lobbing at invaders, two-stage rockets, and land mines. Government-funded factories produced weapons with names like the "eight-sided, magical, awe-inspiring wind-and-fire cannon" and the "nine arrows, heart-penetrating, magically poisonous fire-thunderer." By 1160, the imperial armaments office was producing 3.2 million such weapons a year.

Through trade and conquest, the technology spread beyond China. Europeans turned out to have a special talent for developing gunpowder and arms. They improved formulas, invented new weapons, and proceeded to dominate the world politically, economically, and militarily. The "immortality pill" turned out to be anything but.

PhonographIntended use: Playing back recorded telephone messagesWhen Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, he pitched the device to businesses as a way to speed correspondence. That soon created another need: Companies wanted a permanent record of their phone conversations.

Thomas Edison stumbled onto a solution. In July 1877, while experimenting with telephone speakers in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison noticed that the speaker diaphragm moved in tandem with the sound. He and his lab assistants hooked up a stylus to a telephone speaker. While Edison yelled into it, his assistants ran a strip of wax paper under the needle. When the strip was pulled back under the stylus, the faint sound of Edison's voice could be heard.

What Edison had discovered was the acoustic recording of sound. The needle transmitted sound waves onto the wax paper by cutting a groove that varied in depth depending on the sound wave. The sound was reproduced when the needle passed back over the groove and transmitted the waves through the speaker diaphragm.

The Wizard of Menlo Park immediately set about turning his invention into a product: a marketable device that would record telephone messages. But Edison soon became distracted by another technology - the electric lightbulb - that had a much clearer potential for profit.

Throughout the 1880s, Edison's competitors pushed ahead with the commercial development of phonographs aimed at the American office. Spoken letters and contracts recorded on wax cylinders - the dominant medium - would soon be sent through the mail, they believed, making paper correspondence obsolete. But the sound quality was poor, the batteries unreliable, and the cylinders fragile.

It was by chance that recorded sound found a lasting commercial use. With the business market for the phonograph faltering, manufacturers scrambled to come up with other applications. In 1889, the first coin-operated phonograph was placed inside an arcade. For a nickel, listeners could hear a two-minute recording. That year, a single machine at the Palais Royal Saloon in San Francisco took in more than $1,000 in five months.

Edison jumped into the record business, developing techniques to mass-produce recordings and marketing them to an eager public. It took another decade before the phonograph reached critical mass. By 1899, 2.8 million records had been sold in the US, and recorded music had become the nation's most popular entertainment medium.

Mechanical ClockIntended use: Regulating monastic prayerThe first mechanical clocks showed up in the mid-14th century, built in Italy by Giovanni de Dondi and in England by Richard of Wallingford. Their purpose was to track the motions of celestial bodies, an obsession of timekeepers since eighth-century China, where practically every activity was scheduled according to the movements of the heavens.

Science historian Donald Cardwell calls the precision of these clocks "the greatest single human invention since that of the wheel." The key breakthrough: verge escapement, a simple, oscillating gear system that allowed a slowly descending weight on a cord to drive the clockwork at a steady rate.

The new timepieces served an important medieval market: monasteries. Monks needed accurate clocks to keep track of daily prayer. A monk prayed seven times a day at specific hours, and failing to keep the offices could jeopardize his very soul.

The clock was quickly put to less lofty, and more practical, uses. Prosperous towns adopted the new technology to organize and rationalize their burgeoning complexity. Waking, working, opening and closing markets, signaling curfew - nearly all commerce-related activities became subject to the precision of timekeeping. Without clocks, the modern notion of productivity wouldn't exist. Just ask anyone who bills by the hour.

ViagraIntended use: Stopping chest painIn early 1992, 30 healthy men signed up to take part in a trial that tested the safety of a new drug called sildenafil, which was aimed at treating angina, the chest pain caused by heart disease. The drug, administered three times a day, had an unexpected side effect: erections. "We wondered what this would mean for the continuation of the angina program," says Ian Osterloh, who directed the studies in England. "The erections were a bit of a side issue." The researchers were about to give up on sildenafil.

But then a critical piece of information caught the attention of scientists at pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer. US researchers had been trying to figure out the mysteries of the male erection, and they'd discovered that a common gas, nitric oxide, seemed to play a key contributing role. Sildenafil inhibits the enzyme phosphodiesterase type 5, which in turn increases the effect of nitric oxide.

The Pfizer team put the pieces together and began testing sildenafil - soon branded Viagra - as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. The results are now well-documented. The drug was quickly approved by the FDA, and now more than 45 million prescriptions have been written worldwide.

PunchcardIntended use: Automating the loomIn 1801, French engineer Joseph Marie Jacquard designed a loom that used punchcards - stiff, perforated pieces of paper - to automate the production of intricate patterns in silk. It was a brilliant invention - but not everyone was impressed. Jacquard was nearly killed by a mob of angry weavers, who blamed him for trying to eliminate their jobs.

In 1834, the eccentric English genius Charles Babbage conceived of the first computer, the "analytical engine." He planned to "weave algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves," according to his assistant, Ada Byron Lovelace. Babbage spent decades trying in vain to persuade the British government to put up the money.

It wasn't until the 1890 US census that punchcard technology got a huge boost. A young mechanical engineer named Herman Hollerith used cards to compile the results, which were read by an electric tabulating machine. Hollerith's gadget wasn't exactly a computer, but his firm, the Tabulating Machine Company, would eventually become IBM.

In the 1950s and '60s, traditional punchcard tabulators were displaced by computers, but the punchcards themselves held on as a medium for computer data input. IBM shut down its last card-manufacturing plant in 1984. Yet millions of punchcards are still being used in the US - think hanging chads.